


kintsugi

by nimrodcracker



Series: a blinding flash [7]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Campfire Thoughts, Character Study, Finding Family, Gen, Post-Canon, Self-Acceptance, Updated: 6/7/16
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-06-10 08:38:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6948256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimrodcracker/pseuds/nimrodcracker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six reflects on family lost and found, life before and after two bullets in her brain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kintsugi

Her packages take her through deserts and towns, shrubbery and coastlines. Always on an endless path, with destinations known in name and smudging ink, but never in memory. Delivering them by her lonesome gives her time to think, and think she does when these empty moments are filled with the thoughts that rattle against the confines of her head.

Tonight, she's made camp some-ways off from the road under the yawning overhang of a fallen tree. Not so close to roving bands of raiders who claim lordship over tarmac paths, nor to the creature caves couched among thick vegetation. Maybe far enough from Legion cheerleaders too - those sick *fucks* - if they haven't left. And when darkness settles, she'll be safely out of sight.

She rummages in her pack, wishing for chunks of roasted squirrel tenderly wrapped in paper, only to pull out a can of Pork n Beans. Not the tastiest in Pre-War delicacies, but the last town she passed sold cartons of it, five caps a can. Skims her lean pouch of caps the least, so *of course* she buys that beastly gruel.

NCR's been tossin' caps her way since she linked up with Hsu at McCarran, but they've always felt like dirty money to her. Not as honest work as she prefers, even if it's for a country she'll gladly bleed for, so most of it is traded for NCR dollars that she stuffs into a satchel filled with more wasteland goodies, a satchel destined for Shady Sands in the back of a loaded Cassidy Caravan. Only difference between it and the other loaded goods is the note tied around the buckles, saying no more than a *not dead, doing fine. hope the both of you are too*.

Her heart still twinges at the thought of meeting them again. Even if she's left home long enough for the hurt to ease, her mother bears grudges like a wounded deathclaw, so maybe it's for the best she stayed away - forever, if need be.

It's not the West she's headed for, now. It's the East, towards damp weather and muddy terrain awash with the vibrance of life. Or once-alive dead, at least, the carcasses of shrubbery unmarred by nature's hunger. Routes her feet have yet to warm towards, still comfortable with the feel of crumbling sand and arid gusts in her face.

Sometimes, she walks with Cassidy Caravans, moonlightin' as a caravan guard sans the pay (she refuses to accept any) but only when it's the boss herself leading 'em. Though small talk doesn't terrify her now, being around unfamiliar people spikes her anxiety still.

These days, she's reacquainted with the quiet, the closest thing to a lover she'll get if she ever swung that way (she doesn't). Caving in to old habits like before, a one-eyed veteran chafing under the challenge of settling into a world of two-eyed people, she craves the harrowing fullness of isolation again. Not everyone's patient enough with a one-eyed deadweight, and their derision *burns*.

Big MT was the Pandora's Box of Old World America - the genius of science and tech shaped not by ethical boundaries but destructive curiousity. With the Think Tank wrapped around her finger, it was a trifle matter to request for a new body; one bereft of the scars riddling her skin, with a working eye to replace her blind one, and maybe a new brain to cure her amnesia too.

But something stopped her. And that something convinced her to swap out the synthetic parts implanted in her body the moment she recovered her real brain.

Before she left Big MT, that something was a hunch. After she left, it became truth.

Thing is, nothing about her needs fixing. There are days when that rings hollow between her ears, but kind words and the privilege of hindsight hushes the critics in her head, even if for a moment. For a former army sniper, she's now an embarrassingly clumsy oaf who's useless with anything but a pistol - yet, she's somehow done what even able-bodied people can't boast of achieving.

Really. She's fine as she is, disability and all.

**

Her can of gruel's taking longer than usual to crackle and hiss from the heat, so she nestles deeper into the bed of leaves she's lounging on, watching the meek flames lick the bottom of the can.

Those kind words came from them, the family she found along the way when all she wanted then was to *not* be found. Rag-tag bunch they may be, they travel with her, they do - company in the coldest of nights, laughter in the thickest of silences, all on the road. For that, she can't decide if she's the luckiest asshole to walk the Mojave.

Cass is abrasive corners and intoxicating sincerity which she stubbornly clings to with bleeding palms because they're both starving from the hunger of addiction in a place that offers their poisons as their only respite to the madness all around. Every swig and every puff ravages their wasting bodies like a plague and like a train they ride there's no stopping it as it hurtles full speed towards the dead ends of their deaths - but maybe, it isn't so hard to hurl themselves off because they've got *each other* this time and her heart aches for that sliver of truth to mean more than idle fantasy.

Whenever Veronica smiles, the whole world brightens. A broken bird too (aren't they all?) with wings as shattered as her faith in her folks - but bones yet mend, and though life beats her down she'll stubbornly stand back up with snark on her lips and fists raised and ready because if suffering's a constant then the giggles should too, right? *That's* why she's the sun in their motley crew of fallen stars.

Arcade is the upright tree in a storm, defiant and true. His quiet strength lurks beneath sour armour, armour that's a lab coat of white cloth and shoulderpatch of a cross, frayed and stained in places but it's draped around his shoulders still because come what may, he won't stop believing. He can't, for conviction is the weapon he wields against the disbelievers stuck in a bygone era, those men in red who've lost their way. Conviction; his weapon, his tool, his chain-blade Ripper to amputate the ravenous gangrene and actuate healing. Conviction; it'll heal a place he knows is worth saving.

Boone is intimate ghosts and undemanding silence and nothing soothes her more than uncomplicated feelings. He knows her like she knows the inflections of his monosyllabic non-committals; the sentence in every grunt, the emotion in every veiled glance because they've seen each other, impressionable and young, vandalised and hacked away by war into hardened forms of their former selves but even in stone there are cracks still and always will and there is where their support seeps in like wonderglue to fuse their gaping fissures back together. Sometimes it's a hand, sometimes it's a shoulder, but all that matters is that it's them; the touch of comrades burned by the same brand. If that doesn't the chase away the smothering uselessness, hunting Legion cheerleaders works fine too.

Fragments of herself are embedded within each one of them, she knows, and it's the same for them. That's why they cohere so well, unwanted pieces latching onto each other's craggy surfaces to find homes in hollows that should've been anything but.

Before, it was just pottery she remembers standing on a shelf above the guttering flames of a fireplace, the centrepiece of a hovel tucked in the decaying slums of Shady Sands. These artifacts, these *heirlooms* are the flowers that grow on the corpses of her country that is no more, and though her culture is dead to the world, it endures - because they aren't. Until pretty-boy planted two bullets in her brain, she doesn't realise that the living too can resemble once-broken pieces of pottery.

Cracks they may be and cracks they may have, they're beautiful for it - and even more so together.

**

The longer she chews, the more she regrets picking Pork n Beans over Cram that day in the store. Slimy meat and clumpy beans churn in her mouth, wriggling themselves into the gaps between her teeth like the jitters in her bones.

She's long noticed this: that with them, it wasn't completely good. Just...better. Time away from them has prised her open to that sobering realisation, and then some.

Self-acceptance; it's a road she needs to walk alone.

And she's almost there.


End file.
